With the advent of professional cleaners including laundry and dry cleaning services, the need has existed for packaging cleaned and pressed garments in a manner that preserves the look of the garment until it is to be worn by the consumer. While a number of different garment packages have been developed such as boxes and paper sleeves or bags, the package material most often used today is a clear plastic sleeve or bag that covers the garment. The tube or sleeve of plastic material is generally produced as a roll of material that may be formed as one continuous tubular sheet or perforated and sealed near the perforation to provide a plurality of pre-cut garment bags.
A variety of mechanisms have been developed to place the cleaned garments in the plastic garment bags. Manual as well as automated mechanisms are known in the art for placing the garment in the plastic sleeve in a manner that preserves the pressed and clean condition of the garment. Mechanisms have also been tailored to operate with perforated or continuous sheets of plastic material. In a most basic form, the machine includes an axle for maintaining a roll of plastic, a drive train for delivering the plastic to a garment, a spreader for opening the plastic sleeve to cover the garment and a mechanism, either manual or automated, for surrounding the garment with the plastic. A frame is provided to maintain the configuration of the assembly components and support them from the floor. Additionally, continuous feed mechanisms may include a heat sealer and cutter to tailor the length of the bag cut and sealed to the size of the garment.
More recently developments in garment bagging have focused on large scale and automated operations. Such systems provide a garment bagging process without the need for human transfer of the garment from the cleaning and pressing work area to the bagging work area. Such devices, while suitable for their intended purpose in large garment cleaning operations with ample floor space, do not assist with the problems faced by many cleaning operations in which size, production volume and the maintenance cost of large scale operations are greater than facility size and manual labor costs. In these situations, such devices are not preferred. On the other hand, smaller bagging machines have not changed much in the last several years, as manufacturers have focused new systems on large-scale garment bagging devices.
One problem faced by many garment-cleaning businesses is the efficient management of floor space. In many instances, it is desirable to more efficiently use floor space in a garment cleaning business for multiple use functions. Thus, it is desirable to have the floor space open under the machine, or to remove machine from the work area when it is not in use. Additionally, it is desirable to provide mechanisms for a garment cleaning business that are more compact to provide more efficient use of limited facility space.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for bagging a garment that may be stored and operated without taking up additional floor space and/or that organizes the bagging apparatus components in a more compact manner.